Battleangel

People ought to think about where they host their domains these days.

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

You never know how this sort of nonsense will affect you in the end. Now that the US seems hell bent on exercising this absurd, but still according to their own twisted laws, perfectly logical measure. It is hard to imagine a world where American entities did not figure into the equation. In this case, the registrar was a US company, but even if you think you are clever and place your domain name and servers outside US territory you might still find that DNS root servers are still open to manipulation. As are the only options for making electronic money transfers (Paypal, VISA etc). Or for that matter the search engines that presumably generate a good portion of your revenue.

To be fair, certain issues, like “holocaust denial” are more or less censored in certain European countries. Picking a host nation as a cyber dissident has become an infinitely complex task of issues and limitations. It is a far cry from the free and borderless wired world that we have come to believe in.

Via Boing Boing

The Bush Administration has put forth new rules demanding that visitors to the US from Europe need to apply for “approval” to land, days in advance of purchasing their tickets. Airlines will also be required to provide information on travellers’ families, and to allow US Air Marshals to fly on any flight that will pass over or land on US soil.

Orginal article: Guardian

The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as “blackmail” and “troublesome”, and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington’s requirements.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said.

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

There are two things we can learn from the new New Orleans phone book. First of all, the number of residents, at least those that have a phone, is down considerably. Furthermore, the new residents that are replacing the cleansed are apparently more posh as they can afford Lasik surgery. And so the vultures move in.